Green/yellow solid state lighting via radiative and nonradiative energy transfer involving colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals

Abstract

LEDs made of In(x)Ga(1-x)N and (Al(x)Ga(1-x))(1-y)In(y)P suffer from significantly reduced quantum efficiency and luminous efficiency in the green/yellow spectral ranges. To address these problems, we present the design, growth, fabrication, hybridization, and characterization of proof-of-concept green/yellow hybrid LEDs that utilize radiative and nonradiative [Forster resonance energy transfer (FRET)] energy transfers in their colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs) integrated on near-UV LEDs. In our first NC-LED, we realize a color-converted LED that incorporate green-emitting CdSe/ZnS core/shell NCs (lambda(PL) = 548 nm) on near-UV InGaN/GaN LEDs (lambda(EL) = 379 nm). In our second NC-LED, we implement a color-converted FRET-enhanced LED. For that, we hybridize a custom-design assembly of cyan-and green-emitting CdSe/ZnS core/shell NCs (lambda(PL) = 490 and 548 nm) on near-UV LEDs. Using a proper mixture of differently sized NCs, we obtain a quantum efficiency enhancement of 9% by recycling trapped excitons via FRET. With FRET-NC-LEDs, we show that it is possible to obtain a luminous efficacy of 425 lm/W(opt) and a luminous efficiency of 94 lm/W, using near-UV LEDs with a 40% external quantum efficiency. Finally, we investigate FRET-converted light-emitting structures that use nonradiative energy transfer directly from epitaxial quantum wells to colloidal NCs. These proof-of-concept demonstrations show that FRET-based NC-LEDs hold promise for efficient solid-state lighting in green/yellow.